Another Secret CIA Prison Found

Dec. 8, 2011

By MATTHEW COLE

The National Registry Office for Classified Information, also known as ORNISS, sits in a busy residential neighborhood minutes from the center of Romania's capital city of Bucharest, Thursday, Dec. 8, 2011.

Another CIA secret prison was located and identified today in Eastern Europe, and unlike others previously discovered, this one is in a heavily populated section of a capital city.

According to an AP investigation, the CIA housed six so-called high-value terrorism detainees in a Romanian government building in central Bucharest, in the midst of a leafy neighborhood and next to a railway line.

A secret CIA prison found by ABC News in Lithuania was in a forest on the premises of a former horseback riding academy outside the capital city of Vilnius.

The Romanian "black site," as the CIA detention facilities were known, held high level al Qaeda operatives, including confessed 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and was given the code name "Bright Light."

The detainees were subject to so called enhanced interrogation techniques, according to the AP, which included water dousing, stress position and sleep deprivation, though none of the detainees were subjected to waterboarding while in Romania.

Unlike the CIA's two other European facilities in Poland and Lithuania, the Romanian facility was not placed in an out-of-the-way location.

ABC News reported the presence of a secret CIA site in Romania and Poland in 2005, but their addresses remained unknown. The Romanian site was still in operation, but the Polish site had been shut down. The Polish "black site" was later determined to have been housed in a rural military base northeast of Warsaw.

Within several months, by the spring of 2006, both the Romanian and Lithuanian sites were shut down and the al Qaeda detainees were moved to Afghanistan or given back their home countries. The existence of the Lithuanian site remained unknown outside the CIA until it was reported by ABC News in 2009.

The 14 high-value detainees who were still in Romania and Lithuania in early 2006 were moved to Afghanistan, and then to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba after President Bush announced publicly for the first time that they were in CIA custody. They have remained at Guantanamo Bay ever since.

The CIA would not comment on the AP report about the Romanian black site, but former U.S. officials have confirmed the location of the Bucharest prison, a classified records warehouse.

The Bucharest facility holds the National Registry Office for Classified Information, where Romania's most secret documents and papers are kept. The CIA retrofitted the building to house six prefabricated detention cells, where the prisoners lived.